Sissinghurst, An Unfinished History: The Quest to Restore a Working Farm at Vita Sackville-West’s Legendary Garden
Where to buy Sissinghurst, An Unfinished History: The Quest to Restore a Effective Farm at Vita Sackville-West’s Legendary Garden books online?
- ISBN13: 9780670021734
- Condition: New
- Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
Product Description
A bestselling leader’s passionate memoir about restoring life to one of the world’s greatest gardens
Sissinghurst Castle is a jewel in the English countryside. Its chief attraction is its celebrated garden, designed in the 1930s by the poet Vita Sackville-West, lover of Virginia Woolf. As a boy, Adam Nicolson, Sackville-West’s grandson, spent his days romping through Sissinghurst’s woods, streams, and fields. In this book, he returns to the place of his bucolic youth and finds that the estate, now operated by Britain’s National Trust, has lost something precious. It is still unquestionably a place of cool and beauty but, he questions, where is the effective farm, the orchards, the cattle and sheep? Nicolson convinces the Trust to embrace a simple thought: Grow lunch for the two hundred thousand annual visitors.
Sissinghurst is a personal biography of a place and an inspiring tale of one man’s quest to return a remarkable landscape to its best, most useful purpose. Nicolson is an entertaining and charming writer and this book will capture fans of Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
Buy Cheap Sissinghurst, An Unfinished History: The Quest to Restore a Effective Farm at Vita Sackville-West’s Legendary Garden Online
Related posts:
- The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition
- Unfinished Business
- Undead and Unfinished
- The Bolter: Idina Sackville, the Woman Who Scandalised 1920’s Society and Became White Mischief’s Infamous Seductress
- Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body’s Natural Ability to Heal Itself
I bought this book when preparation a trip to the Kent area of England with a visit to Sissinghurst on my list. I establish it charmingly written and loved the leader’s tales of his growing up there. I was a small disappointed that not more was written about the legendary gardens being unaware of the TV special shown in England on his desire to return to the ancient way of farming on the grounds outside the gardens. In the end I did learn some about the gardens and what it was like to grow up there and reasonably a bit about farming and how it is done now. I wish I had read the book before my visit as I would have known what to look for and would have eaten there, and also have visited the nearby church. I reflect this book is fantastic for a name preparation to visit Sissinghurst but if you want a more indepth look at the gardens, you won’t find it here.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
Adam Nicolson’s //Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History// tells the tale of his ongoing quest to convert the historic National Trust property that belonged to his grandmother, writer Vita Sackville-West, back to its origins as a effective farm. Nicolson’s sense of place is the animating spirit of this book: Sissinghurst’s past, present, and future tucked into the very ancient weald of the Kent countryside, one hour outside London.
Nicolson’s goal is simple: he wants to serve lunch to the over 100,000 tourists Sissinghurst entertains each summer from food grown on the land itself. But his quest to guide this proposal through England’s National Trust is anything but simple, and he discovers that scenery is deeply embedded in culture and community.
Sissinghurst was Nicolson’s childhood home, and he combines memoir, natural and cultural history, and poetic celebrations of flowers and streambeds into his main tale about the push to recreate the farm. Nicolson is an amiable storyteller, presenting the inevitable conflicts in a balanced and honest light, but he is at his best as a scenery writer, a poet of the land like his legendary grandmother. Readers interested in local food movements, environmental literature, and gorgeous prose will be delighted with this book.
Reviewed by Catherine Hollis
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5